


give back an hungrier stare

by sugarboat



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Amputation Kink, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Consent Issues, Gore, M/M, Possessive Behavior, Weird Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-05-18 22:29:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19343953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sugarboat/pseuds/sugarboat
Summary: Elias explores the extent of Jon's healing capabilities.





	give back an hungrier stare

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this kink meme prompt](https://rusty-kink.dreamwidth.org/1380.html?thread=80740#cmt80740) and then I added fluff. Sort of.

Jon has more eyes now. It’s nauseating to watch Elias press close to him from so many angles. For so many reasons. 

There’s so much more to him than Jon used to see. The weight of an ocean pulled and tugged between them. Saturation of thought and reason until Jon can barely tell which ideas are his own and which are Elias’.

Jon wishes he could close that door again. Snap it shut on all of this. Jon wishes the door still existed at all, but he’d felt it buckle and bend and break. He’d let it. 

Elias mouths at an eye embedded in his throat. It’s hard to say if the sensation is strictly pleasurable. But his lips are soft and his mouth is warm, and wet, teasing at the thin skin covering the lower mass of his eye. It blinks slowly closed as Jon swallows. Elias’ breath stirs its lashes, and when it opens again his tongue is a slick intrusion across its surface. 

Jon’s own breathing hitches and stutters. His chest arches, but there’s nowhere for his body to go, no shifting away from the sensation. It’s a thick jolt juttering down his nerve endings, tingling out along his spine. He twists his arms in their bindings, clutching at the thick fabric tied around from his forearms to his wrists, to the bed posts. 

“Jon,” Elias says. Reverent, like this is a sacrament, his voice a red wine flooding out between his lips. “My Archivist. You’re progressed quite nicely, haven’t you?” 

He assumes Elias isn’t expecting an answer. And if he was, well, the gag he’d shoved between Jon’s teeth isn’t doing either one of them any favors. Elias chuckles, a deep pleased quake of a sound, and Jon is forced to Know how he looks right now, a tear dripping down the hollow of his throat. Saliva beginning to glisten around the black cloth in his mouth, that arches up steeply to accent his cheekbones and ties above and behind his ears. Delicate threads of gold chain that dangle from the corners digging into his mouth, hang around his chin for Elias to loop a finger around and pull him unsteadily forward. 

“How are you measuring your humanity now?” Elias asks him. 

Hardly a reassuring question, and Jon’s skin prickles and tightens with goosebumps. The tight curl of dread thick in his stomach is offset only slightly by exasperation. Elias has always enjoyed hearing himself talk, call and response with no apparent need for Jon’s input. It makes Elias give another velvet laugh. Stroke a hand down his cheek fondly. 

“Let’s try a few experiments, shall we?” Elias leans across the bedding to the side table, and Jon’s vision goes strangely split screen, as he half watches Elias perched on his lap (lean, long lines, still dressed because why wouldn’t he be, why wouldn’t he want every advantage between them, Jon bared beneath him) and half watches Elias pick up a knife. “What did we decide before, Jon? I believe bleeding was mentioned.” 

Jon sucks in a sharp breath through his nose. Elias brings the edge of the knife down to his chest, and Jon is hyperaware of each expanse of his skin it skates across. His body tensing and tightening with anticipation. Unable to keep from twitching when Elias brushes it over his nipple, just shy of catching and cutting. Elias continues teasing him, pushing the flat of the knife against his skin before scraping it down, like he’s going to bloody skin him. 

He doesn’t, of course, though Jon still shivers. Elias switches back to its edge and scratches a shallow, burning line across Jon’s sternum, and then he plants the tip of it just below the eye shoved in Jon’s throat. Plants it and digs it in, and drags it downward so Jon’s flesh splits and parts beneath its bite. Bisects his sternum in an achingly straight line, and blood wells up behind it. Hardly enough to spill anywhere, as his skin closes up almost the moment the knife edge leaves his flesh. 

“Hmm.” Elias brings the blade close, examining it as though Jon’s uncooperative body isn’t to blame. His free hand smears in the blood he managed to spill. “Well. Looks as though you can still bleed. If we’re being generous enough to count that little display as bleeding.” 

Jon tries to muddle through the drenched wetlands of his thoughts. He wants to be human, even if he isn’t. One of them thinks he doesn’t need to be, is excited by this change, pictures him almost as a seedling pushing a thin limb up through wet clay. Something tapping on the inside of its shell until cracks begin to form and splinter outwards. It’s an almost unbearable temptation to not put finger to these cracks, to dig and break and prematurely rip whatever’s inside free. 

Not to hurt it. Never to hurt it. Just to _have_ it, and Jon feels his chest clench, watching Elias lick a slow, casual smear of blood off his own thumb. 

“It’s nothing to be afraid of,” Elias tells him, and Jon can’t hep but to scoff, even with his mouth full and saliva threatening to spill over his bottom lip. Elias looks at him fondly. He drops the knife back onto the bedside table and then puts both hands to soothing down Jon’s sides. They pause and press in hard at a dip where his ribs used to be. “I’m sure even you can appreciate having a little more durability.” 

Jon rolls his eyes. It’s not as though he needs Elias, of all people, to chastise him over what he’s done. 

“I’m not trying to scold you, Jon.” 

Elias rakes his nails over Jon’s sides, eight blossoming red lines that sting and swell and heat in a rush before fading away again. Then his hands are traveling back up Jon’s body, lingering strokes of his fingers across the numerous scars in their path. 

“Quite the contrary, in fact – you’ve done remarkably well thus far. Even if you insist on asking for more guidance than you need.” 

Jon huffs out an irritated breath, and ignores the part of him that longs for just this. Elias touching him like he’s something to be treasured, to be slowly mapped out and known, again and again (a prized possession). Elias telling him that he’s done well, that everything that’s happened has been for any kind of reason, has made some sort of impact, was _worth_ it. 

Jon knows exactly how pathetic that is. But he still struggles to remember the last time anyone touched him like this. Looked at him like this. 

Elias smiles at him. “I’d like to show you what you’re capable of, Jon. If you’ll allow me.” 

Is that what this is? Has Jon allowed any of it? Elias is already reaching for whatever he’s going to use next – an old piece of fabric that Jon Knows used to be white, now a washed out brown-rust soaked through all its fibers. A slender wooden rod. 

Elias would stop if he asked him to. He thinks. Elias is winding the fabric around Jon’s left arm, just below the curve of his bicep, and he would stop, if there weren’t something awful and hungry and patient inside Jon, urging him more strongly than his self-preservation to stay. 

“Do you know what this is?” Elias asks. He pulls the ends of the fabric through themselves, makes a simple knot that he yanks into almost uncomfortable tightness. 

Jon makes a muffled sound of annoyance. Elias asking Jon questions he already knows the answers to is irritating enough on its own. Doing so when Jon literally can’t reply exacerbates the issue. 

“Come now,” Elias chastises, “Even if you aren’t able to tell me what the answer is you should be able to figure it out for yourself.” 

Of course. Why wouldn’t Elias make this, too, into an opportunity to shove Jon closer to the Eye? Elias pins him with a look that makes him shiver. Makes him wish for that door, so he wouldn’t have to know that there’s hardly any need for Elias to shove him anywhere. Jon has done all of this himself. Rooted himself to the nerve endings of the Eye, and when Its gaze twitches and spasms so does his own. 

Elias sets the rod over the knot he’s tied, ties another simple one about it and Jon does know what this is. It’s a tourniquet. An old one, drenched in the blood of people he’s absolutely sure were not saved by it. There are stories saturated among its fibers but he can’t pull them from thin air. He needs someone in front of him, needs to tangle a question like barbed wire down their throats and drag their horrors free. 

His pulse has kicked up. It’s something that belongs in Artifacts Storage, something that shouldn’t touch him, be used on him. Something he shouldn’t allow to be wound around his limb and his arm jerks beneath Elias’ hands. Elias is spiraling curls of the fabric around either end of the stick, and Jon has to swallow down a sound in his throat. A word, a plea, for Elias to stop-

Elias glances to him again. A brief study where some understanding is apparently garnered, as if it’s necessary when the air around them is clogged with shared experience. He doesn’t need to look at Jon to know that he’s panicking. To know that something deeper inside him is staring at this scene with wide-eyed rapture. 

“Last chance,” Elias warns him. Jon makes a despairing noise, unsure to whom it’s directed. At himself, or Elias, or the horrible thing that’s bound them. That they’ve bound themselves to. 

Elias smiles, and begins to twist the tourniquet tighter. 

Jon doesn’t know what will happen. This thing has no doubt hurt people – _killed_ people – the Institute wouldn’t have it any other way. The effect starts faster than he would have thought possible. The tourniquet grows tight around his arm, constricted, unbearably so. Elias keeps turning the rod, cinching the fabric tighter. 

It hurts. His skin pinches where the tourniquet catches. His fingers have started tingling, a sensation that spreads more rapidly than he expects. From a light, jittering sensation at the far reaches of his nerve endings to uncomfortable jarring along the entire length of his arm. Up to where the tourniquet winds tighter and tighter. His pulse is throbbing around the constriction. Notably only on one side of it, as his blood flow is slowly cut off. 

Progression, again. Pins and needles, like his arm’s fallen asleep, spiking deeper and more visceral every time he shifts or twitches his arm. Even moving his fingers is becoming unbearable, oddly numb as he watches himself dig nails into his own palm. It hurts, electric spits of sensation, and the pain keeps growing, rising like a Shepard tone. 

Elias has stopped tightening the knot but Jon watches his arm go pallid. He can’t stop jerking it now, even as moving makes the pain all that much worse, agony that’s strangely detached in how it doesn’t pulse to the time of his rapid heartbeat. It’s just there, and constant, high-pitched and white and sundering. He’s twisting as far as he can – not far, not far enough, he can’t escape – instinct begging him to claw and bite his way loose. 

Eventually his arm begins to stop responding. Sluggish twitches of fingers when what he wants to for them to tear and scratch at the binding on his wrist. His skin begins to buckle in on itself in accelerated decay, deep lesions opening to reveal bright red tissue at their centers. Before that too begins to necrose and shrivel, and how- how does it keep hurting so badly, that when Elias brushes a finger across some of those wounds Jon’s body jackknifes and his thoughts grind to an agonizing halt. 

Eventually, it begins to stop hurting. Jon’s face is wet with tears and saliva, though he’s not entirely sure when any of that started. He feels shaken and empty, the way that sobbing always left him drained of emotion and drive. It’s been so long since he last cried, and now he can’t stop sniffling like a child as he looks at his arm. All tight pale skin between ulcers that have eaten down to his bone, punched out of his skin like someone had taken office equipment to his arm. 

He doesn’t feel anything when Elias touches it now. Not even horror can spark with Elias picks up the knife again, though Elias pauses to brush away a few fresh tears from the corners of his eyes. Elias runs his thumb across the wet-clumped lashes of the eye at his throat. Jon doesn’t feel anything when the knife sinks into his arm, just below the tourniquet. 

It slips in so easily, parting his skin and muscle and releasing a smell like rot with it. A quick puff of corpse air that Jon gags at. Even his bone is gone wrong, soft and buckling when Elias grits his teeth and forces the knife through it, and then Jon’s arm is _gone_ \- not gone, it’s there, it’s right there, but is it even his anymore? When did it stop being his own? When he couldn’t move it? Couldn’t feel it? 

Elias releases the knot of the tourniquet, and Jon moans at the familiar sensation of his flesh knitting itself back together. Missing a particularly vital bit of itself to knit onto. Elias soaks up the blood his limb cares to shed with the tourniquet, and then uses a dry corner of the same material to clean off Jon’s face. 

“It’s all right,” Elias assures him. Some shattered part of Jon’s mind clings to the calm of his voice. The assurance. Elias wouldn’t- wouldn’t _maim_ him, wouldn’t make him completely- “You’ve done very well.” 

Christ, why is that making him feel better, even as he feels dangerously close to unhinged when he moves his arm and- and it isn’t tied down any longer, and it’s just a part of itself, and he could reach out and strangle Elias, untie himself, take the knife from him and dig it into his eyes except he doesn’t have a hand-

Elias lies the knife on the bed next to Jon’s side, and cups Jon’s face with hands wet and sticky with blood. “Which would you like to do next?” 

Jon groans in dismay. None of them, nothing next- he’s done, he doesn’t want to do this anymore, he doesn’t want to _Know_ anymore, even as the part of him that’s barely even him is wondering what Elias wants to do next, where he will go, how much of each limb he’ll leave him, what it would be like tied around the meat of his thigh or just below the crease of his hip-

“An excellent suggestion,” Elias murmurs. He works around the jerking and ineffectual kicking of Jon’s leg as he ties it mid-thigh – his right side, this time, like he’s making a pattern out of the ruin of Jon’s body. “You have no idea how beautiful you are like this.” 

Elias does one leg and then the other. An agonizing lifetime of pain and sharply spreading, tingly numbness. It should take- hours, or days, Jon knows that, before his tissue atrophies and withers. Years of ever so slightly inadequate blood flow before his skin begins to buckle inwards on itself from its top layers downward. Down to bone – he Sees in a short, nauseating glance, how his knee rots. Peels itself to display the white curve of bone and gristle meat of fraying tendons. (He remembers how it used to ache early in the morning after he first woke up, and when he thinks of asking Elias to fix that for him now that it’s open and accessible Elias leans down and presses his lips to his stomach.) 

Then it’s gone and not his problem anymore, and Elias has already retied the tourniquet. He holds Jon splayed with one hand clamped on the remains of his right leg, teases and coaxes him open while everything just below the knee of his left dies starved of blood and oxygen. So much sensation that Jon can barely differentiate, radiant pain like starbursts matched off time to the push of Elias’ fingers inside him, petting against his prostate. 

Elias teases his cock against Jon after the tourniquet’s tied to his right arm. He seems – no, Jon knows, he feels it, he shares it – to enjoy the way he can manhandle what remains of Jon’s limbs, of his body. His left leg and what’s left of its joint hooked around Elias’ waist in some parody of actual intimacy. Somehow he’s still there enough to groan when Elias pushes enough to slip the head of his cock inside him, to feel the strain of being stretched open and filled.

Jon’s fucked lazily, because he knows Elias is just edging himself, reveling in – tight, hot, _his_ , so much his – the feeling of being hilt deep inside him. It’s a sensation Jon grasps at, wants to cling to. Elias pushing into him, making a space for himself there. So much when Elias bottoms out and grinds his hips against him, and something about the situation has all this heightened – the tiny spits of pleasure that flare and flicker in the face of his fucking arm shivering and twitching in its death throes. The terrible, aching loss that feels hollowed out inside him every time Elias pulls out. 

Elias is buried inside Jon when he picks up the knife and carves through the dead tissue and rotted bone of his last arm. There’s nothing Jon can do as Elias shifts him, drags his hips up, bends Jon’s body in whatever position he wants. As if this is all Jon’s ever been good for, his extraneous pieces removed for ease of use. 

Elias chuckles at that thread of thought. Or at something. Jon’s finding it hard to concentrate, with Elias mouthing at his neck and fucking him with thrusts that jar his entire body. There’s nothing but the pathetically whimpering breathes Jon forces in and out of out himself. The lurid sound of skin against skin, Elias’ cock dragging wetly in and out of him. Elias nuzzling at his jaw and murmuring praises to him, the connection Jon can’t close amplifying them, hooking into him. Somehow this is exultation for Elias, a show of devotion or something disgustingly close to it, possession and ownership in a seamless loop, the serpent gagging on its own tail. 

Jon can feel Elias’ cock pulse when he comes. Hips stuttering against his own, fucking his seed deep inside him. He imagines it must be easy for Elias to pry what’s left of his legs apart and watch his own softening cock slip out from Jon’s hole. Chased by a dribble of come Jon flushes to feel leak out of himself, and all that he can do is squirm his hips in muted embarrassment. 

“Well, Jon, did you enjoy yourself?” Elias asks. Jon stares at him dully. He hitches in a sharp, close to panicked breath when Elias palms over the new end of his arm. “It seems fitting, doesn’t it?” 

Does it? Jon feels disconnected, from the body that isn’t precisely registering as his own anymore. He’d stopped crying a while ago, and stopped begging into his gag sometime before that. He feels wrung out and nothing is processing quite right. 

“You are the Archivist, after all,” Elias says, like that explains it. “You have a more… passive role.” Jon snorts. It isn’t funny, really. “You’re designed to take what others give you.” 

Elias is pushing his fingers inside him, where Jon still feels sensitive and slightly sore. Chasing after the ejaculate that’s spilled out of him and working it back into him. Searching out the place inside him that makes him buck and twitch and rubbing soft, coaxing patterns into it. Elias works his cock with the other hand. Jon wants to be repulsed at how his body is guided into responding but there’s nothing except a wide, blank stretch in his mind where he thinks his normal emotions used to fit. 

His knee knocks against Elias’ side. He whines when Elias stops jacking him. Moans when Elias tongues at him around his fingers still crooked and working inside him. Elias encourages him, tells him to ask politely for his release, and so Jon mumbles,

“Please, Elias-”

Through his gag and the saliva puddled beneath his tongue, his voice cracked and strained, his body tension and heat and incomplete when he finally comes all over his own stomach. 

“There.” Elias waits until Jon’s come down a bit, is watching him shiver and pant, twisting limbs that aren’t- “I knew you could get back to enjoying yourself, with the proper incentivization.” 

That, at last, kicks Jon’s thoughts into some manner of coherence. He curses around the gag in his mouth, every insult he can think of to sling at Elias – which, thanks to their Eye, is actually quite a lot – while Elias studies him carefully, thoughtfully. Head tilted and eyes serious, as if these were complaints being lodged in his office. It’s undermined by the way his hand is on Jon’s stomach, smearing through the mess of come there. 

“Well, Jon, this is unfortunate,” he says in the first pause breathing necessitates in Jon’s deluge. “I do wish you had said something earlier.” Elias leans forward and tugs the gag down by its thin gold chains, his movements harsh enough – the gag tight enough – to hurt. 

“Fuck you,” Jon says, the second half mumbled around two of Elias’ fingers slipped into his mouth, coated with his own ejaculate. 

“Quite,” Elias agrees. Jon bites him and blood that doesn’t feel right or taste right floods like a small burst dam in his mouth before its tide is stymied, damage healed nicely away. “But, as I’m sure even you must be aware, this manner of damage is rather… severe.” 

“Yes, Elias, even I understand that having my limbs rotted off of my body isn’t exactly conducive to continuing to use them,” Jon snaps. 

His eyes are all open again, from where they’d closed or sunk back beneath his skin – whatever happens to them when they’re not being used, when they’re not seeing and watching and knowing. It’s an affront, how they’re all focused on Elias, always, the last person Jon wants to look at. He gets a dizzying array of angles to sort through, Elias looking smug and pleased and fond, kissing down the side of his chest where eyes peer through the slats of his ribs. 

Elias is enjoying himself, Jon knows, can feel it beneath his own skin. Luxuriating in these moments and what he’s made of his Archivist, what he’s been allowed to make of his Archivist, an edge of anticipation for what’s going to come next whetted against every extended moment. Jon knees him again – it’s the most he has of any of his limbs, and the only one that still feels vaguely like what it should be. The only one that doesn’t send rolling waves of nausea through him to contemplate. 

“What are you planning?” Jon asks, and Elias shudders and groans. In response, Elias brings himself up, slots their mouths together. 

Jon could find it on his own. Submerge himself in the muddy waters kicked up around them, careless of what he might claw or scrape away in his search. Elias hardly deserves careful consideration at this point. 

“Patience,” Elias chides between the soft press of their lips. Jon makes a sound of annoyance, finds himself chasing after Elias’ mouth regardless. Horrified that there’s some part of him that’s bizarrely comfortable with this, stripped of agency and torn down into an object for Elias to behold. “You’re making things more difficult than they need to be.” 

Coupled with Elias rocking their hips together, though neither of them has gotten hard again. Unusual, unnervingly intimate, with Elias stroking hands over his sides and slipping them around beneath him. Jon unable to reciprocate or even properly struggle beyond an ineffectual wriggle of his torso and hips. Elias is warm against him, around him, stretched out over him, the cage of his arms always stronger than Jon remembers to give credit to. 

Jon sighs. It isn’t as though he can go anywhere. It makes it easier to accept Elias pulling them flush, entwined the way their thoughts sometimes become now, an imperfect replication of the mirrored gaze of the Eye, staring out of and into itself. One of them considers leaving Jon like this, a hand-crafted idol made of meat and blood and bone. 

Picture the two of them on their sides, Elias with Jon clutched protectively, possessively to his chest. Picture so much more, every manner of worship a physical manifestation of their Watcher could enjoy, could be made to enjoy, how much knowing could be gathered from the brush of skin against skin. 

“You aren’t going to,” Jon says, feeling what must be Elias’ reluctance heavy in his stomach as they part. “Leave me like this.” 

“There’s too much left to be done,” Elias tells him. Apologetic, almost. “And I think it would bore you, after a while.” 

Jon thinks, acidic and mulish, that was something Elias might have considered before. The contents of his thoughts – or perhaps just their tone, color-speckled with indignation as they are – earn him a low chuckle from Elias. Who has straightened himself and reached back for the discarded knife. Taking Jon’s arm in hand and lining it up against its dead, missing piece. 

“That’s not going to work,” Jon comments, and Elias pins him with a look. 

“Don’t speak if you’re not even going to bother to know what you’re talking about.” It’s casually disappointed enough to sting. And of course, when he tries to See Elias has abruptly shuttered him out, the effect much like finding a door you left cracked suddenly locked tight. “No need to spoil the surprise.” 

“No, we wouldn’t want that, would we?” 

Elias is back to over-acted indulgence, stroking his thumb along the soft flesh of the underside of Jon’s arm. “Do try to hold still now.” 

Jon’s not afforded the chance to reply. The grip on his arm goes from appreciative to cruel, fingers dug into the meat of his arm hard enough to hurt, pinning it to the bedding. Elias meets his gaze for a moment before he brings the knife down again. It’s less artistry than butchery. He hacks away at the unnatural termination of Jon’s limb, making ragged, serrated cuts designed to be slower to heal. 

Slower to heal for what? Somehow the agony Jon burned through earlier didn’t deplete his ability to feel pain – every heavy-handed stab into his flesh pulses and radiates acutely, blurring together into a wash of blank red/white light behind his eyes, a high-pitched tonal ring coursing along his nerves. It’s enough to get him to struggle again, the horror of what’s been done to him finally back, that he can’t do anything, can’t stop any of this, that when he moves to kick and punch or scratch something of him moves, yes, but it doesn’t match his expectations, the mental mapping of his own body incomplete and warped, _wrong_.

Elias shushes him, a quiet little soothing sound. “You’re doing so well,” he tells him. Jon tells him to go fuck himself. “Just a little more.” 

Jon wants to ask, he wants to know – he’s drowned in sensation, from his body and from Elias, the taste of his blood on someone else’s tongue. Pinned beneath Elias’ weight and thrashing, and the reflection of that, the jerk of his body beneath his hips, a low pooling of arousal. 

It doesn’t take long for Elias to finish. The sheets and comforter beneath his arm are soaked. They feel cool in contrast to the inflamed, feverish heat of his limb. He’s been crying again. He’s always hated crying. Jon looks at his arm, mangled even further, wishes Elias dead for a moment of bitter coherence that makes Elias lean in and press his lips to his forehead. 

There’s a flash of realization of what’s about to happen, Jon with all his eyes and the singular gaze they create watching Elias press the freshly ragged end of his arm to its missing piece. Living flesh knitting itself to dead and Jon’s entire body jerks, an instinctive urge to flee, held in place by Elias’ weight atop him. He can hear Elias’ voice but he can’t seem to process it. 

Too much of him is enveloped in the sensation of rotted tissue and bone remaking itself. Blood rushes into his limb slowly, unevenly, redirected by thick clots and interrupted vascular and who knows what else (Jon does, the Eye does, the knowledge of it dribbles in, leaks around an imperfect seal) – and everywhere it flows pain is quick to follow, sharp and stabbing, down through the bone. 

His body doesn’t know how to properly respond. His head is swimming, dizziness thick in his skull and his stomach swooping with vertigo like he was back in Mike Crew’s front room, gasping for air. His heart is beating frantically, flutteringly, fast and weak with starts and stops, and he knows it's from those clots being dragged back into his blood stream, sticking together and then breaking apart, pain being pumped out to every available inch of his body. 

It makes him want to gag. The thought that dead matter is being drawn back into him, that every tremulous quiver of his heart is shunting more of it through him, even as he knows it’s being repaired and remade. Restored in the same way his arm is recovering, layer by layer of his blood vessels reforming and then of his nerve endings firing to life, function returning in little fits of motion that begin with the twitching of his fingers and escalate until he’s shifting his arm mindlessly in its binding, too tired and hazy to struggle the way he wants. 

The return of Jon’s body to equilibrium is slow. Branched and halted along its way with his consciousness dropping in and out. He feels feverish, clammy. His teeth are chattering. The thermoreceptors in his skin can’t decide if Elias’ hands are too warm or too cold where they pet against his sides. Jon leans into the palm that’s offered to his cheek. 

“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Elias asks him. Goads him. It feels like he has to drag his eyes open to peer at him. “Only three more to go.” 

There’s a panicked cacophony in his mind. 

“Or we could always stop here, if you prefer,” Elias offers. 

“Ass,” Jon mutters, voice dry and crackled. It reminds him of the crinkle of old statements in his hand, the brittle scrape of fragile, ancient paper. It makes him lick his lips. 

Elias smiles at him, nauseating from so many angles. The dark center of all mass that Jon can’t look away from. “Let’s continue then, shall we?” 

“By all means.” Best to just get it over with. 

The only blessing of his body being overloaded with refuse is that his thoughts melt away at their edges after long enough. As his systems flood in and out of shock and organ failure, the Eye dragging him along behind it when his flesh falters, over and over. Everything lapses, ebbs and flows, and there’s suffering aplenty, like there always is, but there’s also the thick eternity of the Eye’s gaze in the blackness of unconsciousness, and the cool/hot press of Elias’ hands against him when he wakes. 

His limbs have been untied. It’s the first in a series of revelations. He’s on his side. The sheets have been changed, are now a dark blue. His limbs are untied, and back in place. He twitches his fingers, wiggles his toes. 

His head is pillowed against someone’s lap – probably Elias’. Call and response of its own, Elias runs fingers through his hair, combing it back. Jon feels sweaty, mostly. Imagines it dried all over his skin and crystals of salt left frosted in its wake. There’s not an ounce of tension to be found in his body. 

“You’re awake,” Elias says. “How are you feeling?” 

Jon feels- He doesn’t know. There aren’t words for it. Elias probably knows, anyway. In how the rushing push and pull between them is now a calm, still surface. Jon keeps his eyes closed, and Elias drags his fingers, back and forth. There’s the slicing sound of a page being turned. Elias is reading. 

“Good,” Elias determines. “We’ll get you cleaned up.” 

Jon makes a sound. He turns his face until there’s warm skin pressed against his eyelids, keeping them shut. Elias chuckles.

“Whenever you’re ready, that is.”


End file.
